As a kid, I had a tremendous advantage. My parents had already raised seven kids so they didn’t have much willpower by the time I came around.<\/p>\n
I didn’t grow up without discipline, but it seems as if they simply gave up trying to maintain an advantage in certain areas of life.<\/p>\n
One of these was certainly vegetables. I really had no fear of having to eat my vegetables if I didn’t want to. I don’t really know how all of this developed. It just did. I said I didn’t want to eat peas or corn or anything like that. They didn’t have the energy to fight it. My siblings protested.<\/p>\n
As far as I’m concerned, I was merely getting some sort of karmic payback for all the torture I endured from my older brothers. They may have had to eat lima beans, but I got wedgies. Lots of them.<\/p>\n
Anyway, over the years, I have developed a reputation for hating vegetables. Mainly because I make fun of vegetables. In reality, I talk a good game.<\/p>\n
I eat more vegetables than ever before now. Granted, the list is not that long, but the situation has greatly improved since my childhood. I willingly add certain veggies to my plate when we have them for dinner. I might even go for seconds of sometimes. I sometimes eat a salad as my whole meal.<\/p>\n
My wife jokingly tries to get me to eat some her favorites which are not on my list. Just recently, she took the joke a little further and snuck some spinach \u2013 which I don’t dislike that much \u2013 into a soup she made and tried to pass it off as something else. I totally busted her on that.<\/p>\n
I enjoy the veggies I enjoy. Let’s just leave it at that. Then, something happened recently.<\/p>\n
A friend gave Maria a rutabaga. She had to tell me it was a rutabaga because I had never seen a rutabaga. In fact, you could probably have convinced me that no such vegetable existed and the word was just a piece of nonsense.<\/p>\n
But we had a big honking rutabaga in the house and had to do something with it. In a moment of weakness, I agreed to eat rutabaga. Maria promised me that she would find a recipe which I would enjoy, and she did. I even took leftovers with me to work one day.<\/p>\n
Like a good gambler in Vegas, she decided to press her luck. That’s how I ended up eating a dinner built around cabbage.<\/p>\n
Sure, it had some meat and rice and a few other things, but I sat down and actually ate almost all of my serving. I didn’t even have to choke it down. It didn’t taste that bad.<\/p>\n
I don’t even know who I am anymore. Especially since I will probably try rutabaga and cabbage again at some point. At some point, I’m going to have to go eat a big plate of chicken wings to restore the balance in my blood stream.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As a kid, I had a tremendous advantage. My parents had already raised seven kids so they didn’t have much willpower by the time I came around. I didn’t grow up without discipline, but it seems as if they simply…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,16,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-columns","category-family","category-food","wpcat-3-id","wpcat-16-id","wpcat-17-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1132"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1133,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1132\/revisions\/1133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regularguycolumn.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}